It’s Clegg who is isolated in the face of Cameron’s refusal to be subservient to Merkel and Sarkozy

The EU summit and the Coalition

SIR – Nick Clegg has shown tribal loyalty rather than any loyalty to the government of which he is supposed to be the deputy PM or, indeed to the country.

“Standing tall” within Europe does not appear to have been an option for the Prime Minister, more a subservience to the demands of Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. Theirs was the real intransigence in declining to negotiate.

Mr Clegg has abandoned collective responsibility, and were this a single-party government of any colour, such disloyalty would merit one response: the sack.

Andrew C. Pierce Barnstaple, Devon

SIR – If the Deputy Prime Minister disagrees with David Cameron so vehemently about the use of the veto, then his course of action is clear. He should resign and do the country an even bigger favour by taking the insufferably pompous Vince Cable with him.

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SIR – Following the EU summit, some opposition members and Lib Dems have described the Prime Minister as isolated, incompetent and outmanoeuvred.

How so? The latest “agreements” exhibit no substantive action plans for further eurozone fiscal integration, no tangible increases in eurozone bail-out funding, and yet again no attempt to tackle root causes of eurozone financial problems.

In due course, it will be recognised that Mr Sarkozy and Mrs Merkel have, for the fifth time running, outmanoeuvred themselves, not David Cameron.

D. John Akerman Selsey, West Sussex

SIR – Why should we sacrifice the tiniest part of our national interest for the sake of a plan that will not succeed, designed to save a project that should not be saved?

Toby Roberts Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

SIR –The Prime Minister was right not to participate in the new European treaty to rescue the euro. But his reasoning — saving the City from the Tobin tax — was wrong.

The other 26 leaders have agreed to implement fiscal rules requiring that each of their structural budgets be permanently balanced, and that cyclical deficits can never exceed 3 per cent of GDP.

This is clearly designed to prevent fiscal transfers from regions with a trade surplus, such as Germany, to regions with a trade deficit, a criterion necessary to sustain a currency union in the absence of sufficient wage flexibility and labour mobility, or sufficiently aligned business cycles.

Adding these constraints to those arising from a single monetary policy and interest rate in the eurozone, the 26 leaders have condemned the peripheral eurozone states to permanent recession and depopulation.

Professor David Blake Director, Pensions Institute Cass Business School London EC1

SIR – Although David Cameron has found the courage to thwart Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy, he will no doubt continue to deny us a referendum on EU membership.

He has another option: hold an election. This would, moreover, enable him to rid us of the ghastly Nick Clegg and his cronies.

Roy Aylott Peebles

SIR – Will Mr Sarkozy start wearing even higher heels now?

Will Twidale Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire

SIR – What do we have to do to get ourselves expelled from EU membership, and how soon can we start?

SIR – My family had some experience of the Liverpool Care Pathway (report December 1) last year.

My mother, aged 99 and living in a nursing home, was taken as an emergency to a hospital A & E department with acute respiratory distress. My brother and I arrived soon after. The doctor told us there was no help for her and that she would probably only live for about two hours.

Obviously unwell, but responsive, she was transferred to a stark room and her saline drip taken down. A nurse wanted to remove her oxygen mask, but she insisted on keeping it, as it helped her breathing.

Another nurse was about to give her an injection of morphine, but I challenged this as my mother was not complaining of pain. The nurse said it was normal protocol.

In answer to our questions, we were told that Mother had been placed on the “care pathway of the dying” and that she would not be given any food or water but would have regular sedation.

We asked if she could be transferred to a private ward to be more comfortable in her final hours. This was arranged promptly. Her physician confirmed she was indeed terminally ill and no medication would be appropriate, only care. To everyone’s surprise, she began to improve and after a week could take sips of water and food.

Mother lived for a year, visited daily by family and friends. The highlight of her “extra” year was her 100th birthday, when she entertained 40 people to a tea party.

She would not have lived that extra year, had she been denied water and sedated in hospital last year.

Veronica Stabbins Windsor, Berkshire

TV trailer park

SIR – The BBC insists that, although many find trailers as annoying as advertisements, others consider them an essential guide to content available on all the BBC channels.

Why not set fixed times for trailers, so that we can choose to tune in or switch to something else? Then we’d all be happy.

Brian Christley Abergele, Conwy

France via Iceland SIR – Each time I am mid-Channel on a ferry to France, I receive a text message from O2 welcoming me to Iceland. Do other readers have the same experience? I find it somewhat disconcerting.

Paddy Manning Epping, Essex

Real art of diplomacy

SIR – Professor Stefan Buczacki (Letters, December 7) asks whether copies would do as well as original works of art in embassies in unstable countries. It would be like planting plastic flowers in case natural ones are damaged by bad weather.

Peter Saunders Salisbury, Wiltshire

SIR – If our embassy in Tehran hung costly originals, our delegation to Nato in the Eighties was unimaginatively adorned with cheap Constable prints. Days passed before the ambassador’s attention was drawn to an invasion – on the Haywain, at the Mill – of small blue stick-on Smurfs. His non-amusement was Victorian.

Robert Stephenson Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire

Charities jet off SIR – At the Durban climate change conference (report, December 9), Kelly Dent was “head of the Oxfam delegation”. How much money given to relieve poverty and hunger was spent by charities such as Oxfam sending delegations to Durban?

Mike Post Marlow, Buckinghamshire

Bily missed the bus

SIR – Your obituary of David Langdon (December 8) mentioned his Billy Brown of London Town posters. One, at a request bus stop in London in 1943, read: “Face the driver, raise your hand. / You’ll find that he will understand.” A graffiti addition continued: “We know he’ll understand, the cuss. / The point is will he stop the bus?”

Alistair Macdonald Eastbourne, East Sussex

The vicious circle of exam board competition and grade inflation

SIR – Both schools and individual teachers are under great pressure to maximise pupil grades, and are therefore motivated to select the examination board offering the best pass rates.

In turn, examination boards, which must compete for “customers”, are driven to find ways to make their papers easier to pass.

You could not design a system more likely to encourage a steady fall of standards and the corresponding grade creep we have seen over many years. The cheating that you have reported is an almost inevitable extension of this.

This competition is not serving us well. A single national examination board would remove at a stroke much of the incentive to make examinations ever easier.

John Pope Ivybridge, Devon

SIR – To have examiners failing to do the job they are paid to do would be bad enough. To have them destroying the basis on which they are required to do it is intolerable.

Mervyn Bowley Chester

SIR – Why did Ofqual not know already of this problem? Perhaps we should be informed how many Ofqual employees were previously employed by examination boards.

Richard Abram Southsea, Hampshire

SIR – Congratulations on leading a debate that extends far beyond the conduct of examination boards.

What Britain now needs is a rigorous and internationally recognised qualification that is subject neither to government policy nor grade inflation: the International Baccalaureate.